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It seems I often use the now hackneyed phrase from Hilary Clinton, “It takes a village to…” (Note to self: retire the overused metaphors). Today I’m thinking about it in the context of mentoring. As our two terrific field experience students, Sarah Bankston and Erin Carrillo, finish up their hours, and as our amazing intern, [...]
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What is someone of the Friendly Persuasion doing at boot camp? If it’s about ebooks, I’m there regardless of my philosophy. To coin a profound phrase, “Ebooks are hard!” Okay, not if you’re talking about going to Amazon.com and buying the latest bestseller for your Kindle. [...]
Continue Reading →I’ve been thinking about dieting lately, and it’s not just an after the holidays preoccupation. Let’s talk, not about bodies, but about instructional materials. How can we make our web pages, guides and other tools leaner (but not necessarily meaner)?
My teaching load has been especially heavy and early this semester, so I’ve been [...]
Continue Reading →In preparing an end of year blog post, I decided to consult Instruction & Outreach’s annual report for the 2010-2011 academic year – which admittedly only covers January through June. The trends I want to talk about, though, extend from the end of last academic year through this fall semester.
The annual report [...]
We all know what desire lines are; we just might not know them by that name. They’re the paths that people make across lawns, ignoring paved byways. Desire lines are created by walkers to mark the fastest, easiest route to a destination. Smart landscape planners often wait to see what desire lines will be created [...]
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David Carr and I worked as reference librarians at Rutgers in the Dark Ages, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the card catalog and printed reference books held the answers. David went on to a distinguished career as a library educator at Rutgers and recently retired from UNC’s School of [...]
Continue Reading →As I continue to think about how to teach QuickSearch (Duke’s version of the tool Summon, which is the library world’s partial answer to Google), like a good librarian I’ve been doing a lot of looking around for how librarians conceptualize search tools. I guess I’m looking for the magic bullet that will [...]
Continue Reading →Roy Tennant famously quipped that librarians like to search, and everyone else likes to find. While the average user wants to Get the Stuff, librarians are equally interested in formulating the best strategy to Find the Stuff. There has been tension between searching and finding, between efficiency and effectiveness, between – let’s face it [...]
Continue Reading →Although the Duke Libraries always get a mention when mobile library services are discussed, we know that there’s always more that can be done. A changing landscape of mobile devices, coupled with evolving user expectations, means that we have several investigations going on here in the library. Our Center for Instructional Technology has been [...]
Continue Reading →We’ve posted before about implementing learning outcomes assessment for library instruction. Last month we held a workshop for librarians who do instruction to review basic concepts in assessing student learning. We practiced how to write good outcomes, and talked a bit about assessment methods.
This time around, fifteen librarians who do instruction for Writing [...]
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